The War Between Science and Religion

It is a shame how some apparently learned men will show themselves to be little more than idiots savants for the sake of God. One such man is Nigel Cutland, now professor of mathematics at the university of York. Cutland is a Christian but teaches abstruse mathematics at about the standard Newton and Liebnitz reached 300 years ago, but made trendy with a smidgeon of added philosophy. As a Christian, he feels obliged to defend God. Though God is a far better mathematician than Cutland, he feels the need to defend Him against some non-mathematical critics, presumably because he is not sure God can stand up for Himself.

He says that Richard Dawkins “buys into the mistake that science and religion are at war”, and he does not want God to believe any such thing. As proof, he tells us “there are many scientists, some very eminent, on both sides of the theist-atheist divide”. Well, indeed there are, and there are some scientists who smoke cigarettes and have sex with other people’s wives, but being eminent scientists does not justify their bad habits. And, in any case, it remains true that an overwhelming proportion of the topmost scientists have always rejected God. As the degree of eminence declines, the proportion of believers increases, but never gets to the levels of the general population. Scientists are always less religious than the masses. The exceptions of certain journeymen just prove the rule.

So, Cutland has convinced himself that there is no war between science and religion, even though science demands evidence, and religion demands faith—belief without evidence. Nothing could be more opposite, though Cutland has not noticed it, despite his professorship. As further evidence, he cites John Lennox (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?), a book he greatly admires, no doubt because Lennox is a fellow Christian mathematician, a pastor of Green College, Oxford, and doubtless his chum. Lennox does not think science can decide between two alternative “world views”. One is naturalism-atheism—there is nothing but nature and the material world. The other is supernaturalism-theism—there is a God. Even so, Lennox has decided that God is necessary because there are plenty of gaps remaining for Him to exclusively fill. God is the Intelligent Designer!

It is a view many scientists are happy to accept, mainly because they are unwilling to debate with unreason, and consider that the winning entry will eventually be clear without them having to intervene. It is a naïve view, but like other normal people, most scientists are naïve outside of their own skills. Scientists rightly think that they have a method for showing what is true and what is not by painstaking testing. Whatever fails the tests is ruthlessly abandoned, like the notion of space being filled with a fluid called ether. Progressively science is proving religion wrong. Germs not demons cause disease, and Jesus could only have been acting the magician to drive out demons when none were there, or needed to be. Science has shown it can explain the world, and find answers to problems without the need for a God. God has left no traces in the world, and shows no sign of interfering in it. The evidence is the same as that He does not exist. The hypothesis of God should be abandoned. God is superfluous.

Though, science has being replacing the rickety ladder of religion with a solid staircase to greater knowledge, religion in extremis will destroy everything to stop itself from being destroyed. It has happened before. Look at the Cathar genocide, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the countless religious wars of unbridled malignity. Fundamentalism has been attacking science for a hundred years, and judging by history, it is never safe to think that religion will go quietly. Look at the ferocity of Moslem fundamentalists. They feel under double attack, by science and by the western lifestyle. Then listen to Christian fundamentalists. Religious fanatics would rather destroy the world than admit they are insane.

In his researches, Cutland has discovered that “scientists on both sides believe that science supports their own faith”. He declares atheism to be a faith because it is impossible to disprove God. It is just as hard to disprove the Wizard of Oz, Santa Claus, the Loch Ness Monster or ET. As they are all imaginary, there is nothing about them to prove. You do not need to prove Santa Claus to a child—they accept him as the source of their Christmas presents. But once the seed of doubt is planted, you have nothing to counter it because Santa is as imaginary as Tinker Bell and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Just how does God differ in practice from these other entities? If I am grown up enough to realize that Santa Claus is imaginary, do I have some peculiar faith? The Mighty Calculus thinks so, but it is patently absurd, and simply demonstrates how Christianity destroys reason.

Cutland thinks his hero, Lennox, has shown that science is consistent with theism because it explains “the rational intelligibility of the universe, without which science cannot begin”. You have then to believe that either God thinks much as we do, and admittedly that is what Christians do think, or, as a vastly superior being, he thinks in a vastly superior way, in which case there is no reason why we should find anything He thinks as intelligible, and a more likely case for a God! One cannot expect an idiot savant to think subtly outside of his intellectual cocoon.

Cutland admits that “the unthinking blind faith and fanaticism” of some believers is deplorable, but adding that “it is unscientific to generalize from some to all”. I hadn’t noticed that Christians were so discerning in their long history. The Christian leaders of the US and UK not long ago felt no need to distinguish innocent Moslems from terrorists. Far from it, all were treated as if they were terrorists, and many are still not getting access to justice. Generalizing about Christians seems a proportionate thing to do in view of their own chosen behaviour, well reported as it is in history for those who want to read it. No one is obliged to be a Christian, any more than anyone is obliged to be a Nazi. Those who choose to be Christian do it with the full knowledge of its appalling record as an institution, a record that individual duty can hardly scratch. It is safer for non-Christians to assume that any Christian would willingly kill them to save their soul, since that is what they have willingly done in the past.

The Principle of Falsification

The Rev Dr Paul Sheppy of Reading objects to the claim that, while science determines truth from falsehood by experiment and maths by self consistency, there is no basis for determining theology’s assertions. In a letter to the press, he said it is “the sort of knock-down argument that the average first year student of philosophy of religion should be able to demolish in fairly short order”. His reason is that the “verification” or “falsification” principle is itself incapable of verification or falsification and is in it own terms, therefore, meaningless. He continues to say that Wittgenstein showed many universes of discourse exist, each with its own grammar, syntax and logic, and rules cannot sensibly be moved from one such universe to another. So:

the application of the rules of the natural sciences is unlikely to work with disciplines that make extensive use of metaphor. “Bill’s a brick” is not a scientific statement. As science, it is either untrue or meaningless. But Bill is a brick, and very fine member of my congregation. Moreover, I see the truth of what he believes by my experience and observation of him!

The reverend doctor needs to go back to school and study a little more, preferably in a universe that demonstrably makes sense. The principles of scientific method—including the falsification principle—have indeed been verified because they are subject to constant falsification, and have not yet been thus falsified. The criterion is simple, and, indeed, biblical (Dt 18:22). God explained how a false prophet could be discriminated from a true one. The prophecies of the false prophet were not true. They were not verified in practice. It is the same as the principle he attempts to lambast, and, incidentally, on this God given criterion, the Christian god, Christ, is a false prophet.

Science validates itself by selecting hypotheses that can be demonstrated not to be false—they work in practice. It is a criterion that was good enough for God but is not good enough for his theologians whose true vocation is obfuscation and mysticism to keep themselves employed by gullibles who cannot discriminate fact from fiction.

As for “Bill is a brick” not being scientific, we must concur, but there is no reason at all why it should not be. Science is a part of human thought, and each of us builds it up from infancy as a succession of increasingly complex metaphors based on our experience. Science consists of these metaphors, concepts like magnitude as height, understanding as grasping, time as a journey or a landscape, and so on. There is no fundamental reason why “Bill is a brick” should not be meaningful scientifically providing that the metaphors are defined and Bill’s brickness is falsifiable.

What is the basis, then, for the theological claim that we live on when we have ostensibly died?

More on Judaism and Christianity at http://www.askwhy.co.uk

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Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

The Christian and Jewish liars just never cease their lying. A film has been made with the title, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, by a man called Ben Stein, who seems to be famous for something in the USA, presumably lying! Look him up on the internet and you’ll find he is famous for precisely nothing, unless it is being a chum of Richard Nixon. He has written books, made films and appeared on TV, all of which is utterly forgettable, and indeed, has been forgotten. The man is a nonentity.

His film tries to make out there is an atheist conspiracy in the US, if not the whole world, against Christians. Jews and Christians have always been great at making victims into the victimizers, and vice versa. Almost everyone in the USA, faced with an overbearing Christian smugness amounting to intolerance, feels obliged to say they are practising Christians, though being Jewish naturally is acceptable too, and only a small percentage have the courage to say they are atheists. Yet this tiny minority of atheists is victimizing the 90-odd percent Judaeo-Christian majority! In the USA, it is Christians who are the oppressors, and this film is an example of it.

The film inverts almost every truth there is in America, hardly surprising, one might imagine, for a buddy of the worst president the USA had in recent history before Bush, and one who was rightly impeached, as Bush ought to be. The fact is that these supposed religious defenders cannot tell truth from lies, and could not distinguish God from Satan if they met him sitting next to them on a bench in Central Park.

Sociopathetic Stein claims that science has always included “the ability to inquire whether a higher power, a being greater than man, is involved with how the universe operates. This has always been basic to science. always.” If it is so, then the failure of science ever to find an iota of evidence for God is a conclusion he could not like, but science has always been concerned with the natural world, not that supernatural world occupied by God and his hosts of spirits for which no evidence has yet been found because supernatural is synonymous with imaginary.

Standing by the adage that the old ones are the best, Stein makes the usual Christian claims that the best scientists are religious:

Some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, operated under the hypothesis that their work was to understand the principles and phenomena as designed by a creator.

The opposite is the truth. Galileo lived 400 years ago, under the threat of the inquisition and being burned alive if he denied God or the Church. Newton lived 300 years ago when the baneful influence of Christianity was still strong, and the threat of the inquisition was just fading, but Christianity was still compulsory in British academia because tenure depended on it. The only modern great Stein can cite is Einstein who repeatedly explained that he was a pantheist not a theist, and did not believe in Jewish and Christian fantasies. Nature was Einstein’s God, and it is typically Christian chicanery to claim Einstein as a believer.

Stein likes to list scientific achievements, in addition to the three scientists he knows the name of, to make it seem as if they depended on what he is defending, belief in God:

There would be no modern medicine, no antibiotics, no brain surgery, no Internet, no air conditioning, no modern travel, no highways, no knowledge of the human body without freedom of inquiry.

Science discovered all these wonders with no help from God. Freedom of enquiry is, of course, what the Church did not want, and still does not want. Science follows its own clues and has found out what it has by so doing, not by listening to the prescriptions of preachers, pastors and rabbis. That is what narks these fundamentalist Republican Christian obfuscators. This film is really a defence of idiotic Christian fundamentalist claims that an ignorant book, which necessarily runs counter to the discoveries of science, was written by God. These people make God into an ignoramus and an idiot because they are appealing to the most ignorant and idiotic elements in society as part of their scheme to keep their power and riches.

Their philosophy, the philosophy of neoconservatism, openly admits that religion is to be used to control the mass of people who believe it. The controlling elite, needless to say, do not believe a word of it. They pretend to, simply to get voting fodder among the dimmest elements of the electorate, because it saves them jerrymandering by resorting to bent chads and judges.

Their claim is that science is threatening freedom of enquiry—even though it is founded on it and utterly depends on it—because it rejects religious claims like Intelligent Design, an alternative to Creationism—literal belief in the bible—that are not scientific and cannot be accepted into science if science is to remain what it is, and not become an aspect of theology. What is scientific is what is demonstrably true, not what a lot of religious crooks and shysters pretend is true to win sympathy from people unable to escape Dark Age mindlessness and superstition. They themselves are too stupid to realize that, if they succeed, they will bring back the Dark Ages, and the scientific knowledge that has given them world domination will be lost, and the countries that are not ruled by donkeys will take over.

Anyone who values our modern achievements has to oppose this counter-productive fancy for medieval Christianity in the USA. The leading Christians have rarely been good, as any unbiased inspection of Christian history will show, and for much of its 1700 years it has deliberately and cynically kept people in abject poverty and misery so that an elite could benefit. Support Christianity to get into heaven, if that is what you believe, but you had better be sure your pastor is a saint and not a devil. Mostly they have been the latter.

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